Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition

Dimitri Gutas is Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic at Yale University, USA where he studies and teaches classical Arabic and the pre-modern intellectual tradition in Islamic civilization. In addition to his lexicographical interests in Graeco-Arabic studies, he has devoted a large part of his scholarly career to the edition and study of Greek philosophical texts translated into Arabic and their influence in the Islamic world. In this field he has published Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation. A Study of the Graeco-Arabic Gnomologia (New Haven 1975), Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire 2000), and has been involved from the beginning as co-editor in Project Theophrastus. Within Arabic philosophy, he has concentrated in particular on its greatest exponent, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the medieval Latin world), on whom he wrote the fundamental Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition and Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works.

Contents: Presocratics and Minor Schools: Pre-Plotinian philosophy in Arabic (other than Platonism and Aristotelianism): a review of the sources; Sayings by Diogenes preserved in Arabic; Adrastus of Aphrodisias, (Pseudo-) Cebes, Democrates 'Gnomicus', and Diogenes the Cynic in the Arabic sources; Plato: Plato's Symposion in the Arabic tradition; Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Farabi’s Talhis; Aristotle and the early peripatos: The spurious and the authentic in the Arabic Lives of Aristotle; The life, works, and sayings of Theophrastus in the Arabic tradition; Eudemus in the Arabic tradition; Late antiquity and the interface between Greek and Arabic: Paul the Persian on the classification of the parts of Aristotle's philosophy: a milestone between Alexandria and Baghdad; The starting point of philosophical studies in Alexandrian and Arabic Aristotelianism; Philoponus and Avicenna on the separability of the intellect: a case of Orthodox Christian - Muslim agreement; The malady of love (in collaboration with Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt); Index.